Austen's Powers?: Comparison between George (Eliot) and Jane

Began the daunting task of (re)reading George Eliot's "Middlemarch," after long search for an edition with readable type and weighing less than a concrete slab (WS loaned me an old two-volume hb). When you begin Middlemarch you know immediately that you are in good hands with a really super-intelligent author - one of those very rare authors (Joyce is another) about whom I feel that, if I were to devote a lifetime of study, I might (but probably still couldn't) understand all that their novel encompasses and contains. Even in the first 40 pp. or so - so many trenchant and unusual observations - comparing, in the preface, Dorothea Brooke with Saint Teresa, for example, or some of the sly asides such as the sentence in which she contemplates for just a moment how a cat (Murr, she names it I think) might contemplate our behavior. At first blush, Middlemarch seems very much like a late-edition Austen novel, but that's not so: they're similar initially in that, like Austen, this is a novel about marriagable sisters, both attractive, one (Celia, the younger) slightly more so, the older, Dorothea, extremely intelligent - much more than the men around her. The male guardian - in this case, an uncle, is, like the dad Emma, is somewhat foolish and feckless and can't really keep up with the daughter's thinking. Like Austen, the setting is English provincial, and the plot, again initially, focuses on the confusions of love: Dorothea, smart as she is, is amazingly obtuse about love and courtship, and thinks that one of the dashing young men is after Celia when it's obvious he's interested in Dorothea (she's much like Emma in this naivete). Okay, but there are vast differences between Austen and Eliot: style first of all - Eliot much more apt to use metaphor, analogy, and authorial aside - which is to say, her novel is more self-consciously a literary text, whereas Austen's is more a transparent lens through which we see, seemingly without authorial intervention, the behavior of the characters. Most important, Middlemarch is far more "political" than anything Austen wrote - Dorothea is motivated by trying to improve the lives of the villagers, which will be central to the plot, whereas in Austen the main characters are essentially oblivious of the social and historical forces around them. One disappointment, however: why must Eliot make Dorothea so obtuse about love? It's obvious to all readers from page one that Casaubon is dry as a stick and totally unsuitable to her - why can't she see this? She's naive but far from stupid. As their unhappy marriage is essential to the story, why didn't Eliot make him at least attractive in some way? I think about portrayals on stage of Malvolio in Twelfth Night, and how I have long argued that it is much more effective to make him handsome, dashing - at least a possible match for Olivia. To my knowledge only friend AW did so in an actually production, and the results were great - same principle here: Eliot would have done better to make Casaubon a plausible match for Dorothea.